structural provisions. After expounding on its inadequate features, he asked disparagingly,
“Where then is our republicanism to be found?” Reminding Kercheval of his earlier and similar
disappointment in the structural deficiencies of the nation’s organic law, Jefferson commented,
“The infancy of the subject at that moment, and our inexperience of self-government, occasioned
gross departures in that draught from genuine republican canons.” His reflection reveals a sense
of sustained ineffectuality giving rise to the sterile mechanics of constitutionalism and the
administration of state all together lacking in genuine republican substance. “In truth,” he
concluded, “the abuses of monarchy had so much filled all the space of political contemplation,
that we imagined everything republican which was not monarchy,” hence, Jefferson’s comment,
about the Virginia legislature in 1782, that “173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one…
an elective despotism was not the government we fought for.” Fear, pessimism, and
misunderstanding, rather than a true appreciation of republican principles, Jefferson believed,
explained the architectural deficiencies in and the diminution of republican principles from the
constitutional scaffolding upon which the nation and the State of Virginia were to be governed.
Events had proven what Jefferson earlier feared, namely, the potential aggrandizement of
national power at the expense of local and state sovereignty.
Jefferson’s response to this ubiquitous setback lie in his standard reliance on abstract
principles, specifically, his ward republics, which were to be divisions within each county “of
such size as that every citizen can attend, when called on, and act in person” to govern locally.
“These wards, called townships in New England,” he explained to Kerchevel, “are the vital
principle of government, and have proved themselves the wisest invention ever devised by the
Unlike many of the founders, Jefferson believed that a republic must be
established on more than mere consent, and many of his republican proposals were considered
1
Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816, and Query XIII in Notes on the State of Virginia, in
Writings, Notes and Collections by Merrill D. Peterson (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 245, 1396-
1340. All citations hereafter are to this edition.
2
Convention